The Montagnards guard the high passes, making sure that only the free and the correct enter the promised lands. Sometimes there is an error -- weather vagaries, delay in changing the guards -- and a suspect person gains ingress. Then the Montagnards swoop down from their heights in a flurry of snow and gravel and puruse bloody retribution. Never vengeance, for they act only from love, but always stern and bitter rectitude.posted by Jay at 8:43 AM | Link to this Story Word

Friday, November 12, 2004

Lachrymose

We can been driven to lachrymose extents by the most unlikely events -- random scents, a certain temperature, a certain noise. Sometimes the great herd of life drives us as well, the likeliest events -- love, death, heartache, heartease. Like detah, you can rarely choose your time, but you can sometimes choose your manner. For whom shall you cry next?posted by Jay at 3:47 PM | Link to this Story Word

Thursday, November 11, 2004

Jovian

Jovian. Round and striped. God's beachball, a failed star wandering in a radio-pumping orbit out beyond the water belt where nothing ventures save stray Oort objects and the odd mechanical doodad hurled skyward by hairless monkeys yet fresh from the trees. We see our Jovian friend in the night sky, bright as any electric torch borne by a mechanical bird. We peer at him through tiny lenses and lengthy tubes, until his storms and moods might seem to become our own. Some of us even develop red spots, perhaps in a Jovian sympathy.

Disneyland, city of dreams, built on scrubland and old pistachio farms, raving monument to a man obsessed with a flat, colored vision of the world far too wholesome for even the most simpleminded Bible belt teen, mouse-eared and castle-turreted, filled with a neofascist vision of perfection where even the flowers slip beneath the earth at the first sign of rot and the dead are wrapped in celluloid winding sheets and consigned to perfect furnaces so that their smoke slips unnoticed into the spaces behind the sky.

Lines of lightning stagger across the sky. Blue flashes paint her eyes, the strobes of God. She can see the mountain peaks limned in color, shouts against night's darkness. She is never alone here in the high places, not when the lightning dances and the thunder rumbles half familiar words to echo against the whispering pines.posted by Jay at 11:11 PM | Link to this Story Word

Sunday, November 07, 2004

Subrogation

The practice of subrogation was outlawed in the Antitolerance Acts of 658, r. Steuben III. The beadles of each township were authorized "a long spoon, a horsewhip and three stout servants" in order to pursue and bring malefactors to a suitable and condign reckoning. Luckily for the Caprine Dissent movement, the duchies of Raekirk and Blue Wallow refused to implement the reforms of which the Antitolerance Acts were just one component, and so the goat-lords were able to flourish in their practices of subrogation, demurrage and so forth all through those dark years.posted by Jay at 8:31 AM | Link to this Story Word

I've been nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Novelette, and for the John W. Campbell, Jr. Award for Best New Writer!Award info | Me

Read the Hugo-nominated story for free at Fictionwise.comQ: What is this?A: A fiction experiment. Every day, people email me words. At some random point in the day, I pick a word, write a quick story about it on the spot, and post it unedited (except for a quick typo patrol).Q: What did that word mean?A: Look it up:

Q: Can I send you a word?A: You bet. Include a definition if the word is deeply obscure -- or not, if you prefer. Send it to jlake@jlake.comQ: I've got something to say about this.A: Click over to the Story Words discussion topic.Q: Who else is silly enough to do this? I think it's kind of neat.A: David Jones, for one. Surf over there and check him out. Drop him an encouraging word, too. He's a brave man.A: Jeremy Tolbert, for another, with his Microscopica project. Likewise show him some love.A: Jason Erik Lundberg with his Mythologism blog.Q: You're even cooler than KITT the Knight Rider car. Do you have a mailing list to announce your latest hijinks?A: Of course I do. What kind of self-promoting, narcissistic writer would I be otherwise? Email me. Occasional mailings regarding stories appearing in print and online, weird stuff in general, and appearances of the Greek Chorus.